Prehistoric People Decorated With Cave Lion Pelts

Some 16,000 years ago, prehistoric humans ventured deep into the La Garma cave in Spain to perform sacred rituals. Guided by lanterns made of animal fat, they navigated hundreds of feet through dark caverns and around thick stalagmites until they reached one of their circular stone huts, each of which had a horse skull at its center.

Though archaeologists don’t know what religious ceremonies took place inside the huts, they think they now understand a piece of the décor: a cave lion pelt, perhaps used as either a rug or a roof.

Eight of the nine cave lion toe bones found in the Upper Paleolithic cave site.CreditMarian Cueto

In the many years that he, his wife, Marián Cueto, and their colleagues have spent exploring the vast caverns, they had uncovered more than 30,000 bones, most of which belonged to horses and goats. Mixed among all those bones were the cave lion claws, the only remnants from the beast.

“It was very strange to find only the claws,” said Dr. Camarós. “Everything you have inside this cave was a thing humans introduced to it.”

La Garma is like a time capsule into the lives of the people from the Upper Paleolithic era, according to Dr. Camarós. For thousands of years it had remained untouched, so everything inside looked exactly like it had when the ancient people performed their rituals.

Since the only cave lion remains that the team found inside the cave were claws, Dr. Camarós said, that most likely meant that the prehistoric people brought only the lion’s claws into the cave. For his team the question became, ‘Why would Paleolithic people only bring lion claws into the cave?’

“Our interpretation is that the claws were attached to the skin of the lion,” Dr. Camarós said. “You know those horrible carpets which people have in their house, the bear carpets with the claws and head? This would be very similar but without the head, just the claws and the pelt.”

He thinks that the prehistoric people may have skinned cave lions with their claws intact, and either placed the pelts over huts to make a tent or laid them on the floor. Then, after thousands of years the skin and fur disintegrated, leaving behind only the fossilized claw bones.

To support their hypothesis the team points to markings they found on the claws. Each claw has a similar pattern of scrapes and scratches that seemed to have been made by human tools. The patterns led the team to believe that the early humans were well acquainted with the lion’s anatomy and knew exactly where to cut to sever the skin from the tendons and ligaments.

Though the researchers are not sure how this cave lion died, Dr. Camarós thinks it was hunted by early humans. He said that the findings strengthen the idea that humans hunted cave lions, and he speculated that humans should potentially be considered as a possible factor in the species’ extinction, around 14,000 years ago.